meaning of home in 1950s britain

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2005 40: 341Journal of Contemporary History Claire Langhamer

The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain

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Claire Langhamer

The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain

In November 1959 the British social scientist Mark Abrams used the pages of The Listener to draw attention to an apparently new postwar development:

. . . for the first time in modern British history the working-class home, as well as the middle-class home, has become a place that is warm, comfortable, and able to provide its ownfireside entertainment in fact, pleasant to live in. The outcome is a working-class way of life which is decreasingly concerned with activities outside the house or with values wider

than those of the family.1

This home-centred society, founded on cross-class affluence, was describedas exhibiting a number of novel features, including re-worked gender roles (thedomesticated husband and chooser and spender wife) and family-focusedleisure. In effect, it was claimed that the years immediately following thesecond world war witnessed the triumph of a comfortable, consumer-boundand increasingly privatized domestic lifestyle accessible to all.

A businessman as well as researcher, Abramss commitment to consumerresearch saw him implicitly promoting lifestyles founded on consumerism:certainly the veracity of his findings on youth spending patterns has been chal-lenged by recent work. 2 However, Abrams was not alone in identifying theincreasing domestication of postwar British society as a central and distinctivedevelopment. Graham Crow has argued that:

It is . . . in this period that the modern domestic ideal of an affluent nuclear family living in ahome of their own and enjoying the benefits of leisurely home life took shape, with emphasisplaced on the privacy of the individual household rather than the wider community. 3

In a more overtly critical vein, Lynne Segal describes the tense domesticity andanxious conformity of the fifties, when a seemingly endless and all-embracingconsensus held sway throughout almost every Western nation. 4 JamesObelkevich notes simply that the one post-war trend that stands out above allthe rest is the growing significance of the home. 5 In Britain, as elsewhere in

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, the JCH referees, Alex Shepard and NickHayes for their very helpful comments on this article.

1 M. Abrams, The Home-centred Society, The Listener , 26 November 1959, 91415.2 B. Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford 1998), 246.3 G. Crow, The Post-war Development of the Modern Domestic Ideal in G. Allan and G. Crow(eds), Home and Family. Creating the Domestic Sphere (Basingstoke 1989), 20.4 L. Segal, Straight Sex. The Politics of Pleasure (London 1994), 4.5

J. Obelkevich and P. Catterall, Understanding Postwar British Society (London 1994), 144.

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Europe, the modern home and its inhabitants were represented as the sym-bolic, and actual, centre of postwar reconstruction.

The central aim of this article is to explore the meanings of home in post-war Britain: how was home situated in public discourse and what was the rela-tionship between public perception, individual desire and material reality? Thearticle will consider the extent to which the British home was re-made in theseyears, asking whether domesticity 1950s-style was distinct from the moderndomesticity that a number of historians have identified in the 1930s, 6 con-sidering whether gender roles were differently configured in the Cold War eraand exploring the degree of penetration achieved by the home-centred model.

The article draws upon life history sources and social survey materials thatallow access to subjective understandings of home. In particular it employsevidence collected by the pioneering British social investigative organization,Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation was established in 1937, with the

avowed aim of constructing an anthropology of everyday lives, generatingmaterial into the 1950s. Its approach was eclectic but included observationalresearch, the solicitation of diaries and the collection of responses to amonthly directive, a series of open-ended questions on particular topics sentby the organization to a panel of volunteers. In 1981 the directive system wasrevived and a new and ongoing Mass-Observation Archive was created. In itstotality, Mass-Observation offers an interminable attention to the daily. 7This research draws upon old and new Mass-Observation to explore bothhistorically-sited meanings of home and recently-solicited memories of thepostwar period. 8

As a number of studies have ably demonstrated, attention to home allowsfor intervention in a number of debates around the nature of social change inthe middle years of twentieth-century Britain. 9 Significant social, cultural andeconomic developments such as changes in the nature of work and tech-nology; demographic and emotional shifts; rising standards of living and post-war patterns of immigration all informed, and were informed by, the natureand status of the British home. 10 This article will show that there was muchthat was new in the postwar British home: the impact of war and a changedeconomic context wielded a major influence both materially and discursively.Yet the new was sometimes not quite that new. In a number of ways it was

dreams and aspirations first formulated in the 1930s which were realized in

342 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 40 No 2

6 For a review of the field see A. Bingham, An Era of Domesticity? Histories of Women andGender in Interwar Britain, Cultural and Social History , 1, 2 (2004), 22533.7 B. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. An Introduction (London 2002), 75.8 For more on Mass-Observation see D. Sheridan, B. Street and D. Bloome, Writing Ourselves.Mass-Observation and Literary Practices (Cresskill, NJ 2000).9 See, for example, W. Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race and National Identity,194564 (London 1998); J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 190050(Basingstoke 1995); A. Light, Forever England. Femininity, Literature and Conservatism betweenthe Wars (London 1991).10 This article does not directly address the relationship between postwar migration and mean-

ings of home. For a comprehensive study of this area see Webster, op. cit.



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the 1950s. More specifically, pre-existing demographic trends framed andfuelled the desire for, and possibility of, a more home-centred way of life,whilst modern domesticity pre-dated the end of the war. Furthermore, if onelegacy of the 1930s was the desire for a modern home, another was the impos-sibility, for some, of attaining it. Even at the end of the 1950s significantsections of the British population remained excluded from the home-centredsociety: housing need remained a crucial political issue. Fundamentally, then, afocus upon the home, its significance, meanings and the lived experiences andrelationships within it allows us to explore the tension between past, presentand future within postwar Britain and encourages us to see the 1950s as aperiod of instability rather than unthinking smug conventionality. 11

In October 1942 Mass-Observation asked its panel of largely, but not exclu-

sively, middle-class volunteer contributors the question: What does homemean to you? 12 Responses suggested that the majority of people, men andwomen equally, consider their home of great importance, and many regard itas the centre of their life. 13 It is not, perhaps, surprising that at the height of war, individual men and women looked to home as a centring value in theirlives. As Leora Auslander demonstrates in her article in this issue, the loss, orpotential loss, of home has symbolic as well as material consequences. Forexample, one male respondent observed that:

Home means being on leave, and the complete relaxation that means. Leisure, quiet, privacy,courtesy, relative luxury and comfort, forgetfulness of the army and all idiocy and pettyoppression, muddle, hurry and noise and squalor and discomfort, anxiety and worry. . . . Inever appreciated home before the war so much as I do now. 14

For women, too, the circumstances of wartime intensified a longing forhome, as this womans response indicates: Home means to me a place of myown where I can have my own things and be on my own and invite my ownfriends. In fact, the antithesis of a billet. 15 For these and other respondents theexperience of war enhanced the significance of home: fantasies of home, at anumber of different levels, provided a counterpoint to, and explanation for,war itself.

Yet elsewhere, the ways in which the panel articulated their attachment tohome suggests a simultaneous looking backwards and looking forwards a pivot between a home life experienced by some but desired by many in the1930s, and the material reality of the 1950s experience where some, thoughnot all, of those dreams were realized. Chief among the meanings ascribed to

Langhamer:The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain 343

11 L. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Basingstoke 2000), 166.12 Mass-Observation Archive (hereafter M-OA), Directive Replies (hereafter DR), October1942, Home.13 M-OA File Report (hereafter FR) 1616, 3 March 1943, unpaginated.14 M-OA FR 1616, 2.15

M-OA FR 1616, 8.



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home by the 1942 directive respondents were those of relaxation, freedomand comfort. As one 45-year-old woman teacher put it:

Home means to me, warmth, shelter and peace, a place where I can be myself, to relax whennecessary, to have my own possessions near me and to use them when I wish: a place whereI can work at my own speed and not keep to a time-table as I have to usually or not workat all; a place where I can choose my own radio music, keep my own books, pictures andflowers, and move furniture around for a change, and the place where I can feel safe. 16

An association of home with a privatized, family life was important to bothmen and women. For one man, home was the place where one is in the com-pany of the person or people whom one loves best. A female panellistobserved that: You never realize what home means to you until you havefounded one yourself and created a family of your own. To us it means all,security, happiness, comradeship, whilst another stated that: Home meansthe spot where I can keep my family safe and sheltered and private. 17

Whilst home as a place of relaxation, freedom, peace and privacy was acentral motif, home as the location for personal artefacts, a place associatedwith actual physical comfort and a psychic space within which to establish anddevelop personal and family identities were also significant factors. For oneman home meant a loving wife, an easy chair, a comfortable bed, a real cup of coffee, a good wireless set, a number of books . . .. 18 Unsurprisingly in view of its status as a work place, as well as a living space, more women than menhighlighted the physical environment of home as a significant factor. As Mass-Observation noted, It matters more to the ordinary woman that her homeshould be aesthetically furnished, that it should be light and practical to run. 19

In contrast, more men than women defined home as the pivot of their life. Asa 39-year-old from Yeovil put it:. . . [home means] practically everything. Its mighty fine to come home after a long day to seethe wife and hear the kids. To have a tea which always is above minimum requirements andthen, in summer, to poke around in the garden, in winter to sit on top of the fire, to read or fallasleep. 20

These gender differences in the meaning of home reflect both the differentroles played by men and women within the home and the ways in which theprivate and public distinction was mediated by gender. It was, nonetheless, leftto a female panellist to anticipate a central theme of postwar domestic life in

Britain when she stated that:I believe it is in the building up of home life that our future greatness depends. This setting, thesolidarity in families, is still the best ideal of life; it is here that the old, young and middle-agedget each others point of view. A happy home and family life is the bulwark of a Nation. 21

* * *


16 M-OA DR, October 1942, Home no. 1048.17 M-OA FR 1616, 45.18 M-OA FR 1616, 6.19 M-OA FR 1616, 11.20 M-OA DR, October 1942, Home no. 2697.21

M-OA FR 1616, 9.



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The view that a happy home and family life is the bulwark of a Nation mightindeed be taken as the blueprint for postwar reconstruction in Britain. Whilethe British Welfare State placed family maintenance at its centre, explicit con-cerns around population decline and rates of marriage failure were evident inthe setting-up of the Royal Commission on Population (194549) and theReport into Procedure in Matrimonial Causes (194649). Such anxieties wereclosely linked to the availability of suitable locations within which family lifecould be re-established and safeguarded. In July 1945, Picture Post outlined aplan to get the houses needed in the postwar world. 22 The article beganwith a letter from an ex-serviceman which exemplifies the extent to whichaspirations for family life were obstructed by the lack of actual homes:

I am 27 years old and have just been discharged after 5 years in the Service. I intended gettingmarried in May, and settling down to start a family. For the last six months I have beentrying to find a house, a flat, anything, where we could live. But nothing doing. The best wehave been able to get so far, is our name on a never, never council list, an offer of a furnishedflat at four guineas a week, and a house, bomb damaged, at 1,500. All this out of my wages,6 per week as a clerk, before deductions. Well, I have decided with my fiance that afterbeing engaged for three years, we are going to keep on being engaged till we get somewhereto live. We dont want to live with her parents or mine. We have seen too many marriages gowrong that way. And we arent going to bring up our children, living in furnished rooms.Whats happened to the better Britain you promised us a couple of years ago? When weneeded guns, the government found them. When we needed planes, the Government foundthem. We want houses. So what about it?

For Picture Post in 1945, the housing question continued to be more than a

personal problem, it [was] a problem for the nation.Certainly, the rebuilding of British housing stock concerned policy-makersfrom an early stage in the planning process: the devastation wrought bywartime bombing ensured that this was unavoidable. Moreover, the peopleswar rhetoric encouraged a peoples participation in housing planning. Beyondthe government-sponsored Dudley Committee, a number of other bodiesattempted to discern the housing preferences of the British with the aim of influencing the rebuilding of the nation. In its 1943 report, An Enquiry intoPeoples Homes, Mass-Observation set itself the task of recording views onpostwar housing stating that: However compressed, uninformed and contra-

dictory the feelings and opinions of ordinary citizens may be, it is theseopinions which must either be met or modified and led into new channels byplanners. 23

As we will again see when we examine responses to the Britain Can Make Itexhibition of 1946, the feelings and opinions which people brought to thepostwar home help to account for the lively dialogue between past and presentvalues evident in the reconstructed home. Although broadly satisfied withtheir present domestic situation, those surveyed by Mass-Observation in 1943


22 Picture Post , 28, 2, 14 July 1945, 1617.23

Mass-Observation, An Enquiry into Peoples Homes (London 1943), 5.



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were quite willing to offer descriptions of what the organization explicitlydescribed as dream homes of the future:

On the whole, people (notably housewives) are very long-suffering as far as their housing

conditions are concerned, and are inclined to put up with much. At the same time, they arequite capable of envisaging the sort of home they like. They are ready to help the plannersand architects to build it for them. 24

In fact, 49 per cent of those surveyed would ideally have liked to live in a smallhouse with a garden; 10 per cent wanted to live in a bungalow (a findingwhich surprised the survey-makers) and flats were by far the most unpopularof housing types. 25 Other wartime studies produced similar conclusions. 26Privacy, self-containment and plenty of labour-saving devices were central tothese visions of the future.

Dream homes were not, of course, simply buildings. Home is a fluid con-

cept, open to multiple meanings: a house is not necessarily a home. As outlinedby Richard Hoggart in his semi-autobiographical account of working-classculture, the good working-class home boasted warmth and a good table by which was meant the full provision of tasty, not necessarily wholesomefood. 27 For Hoggart, home was, and had long been, the centre of working-classlife. As he explained: Where almost everything else is ruled from outside, ischancy and likely to knock you down when you least expect it, the home isyours and real: the warmest welcome is still Mek yself at ome. 28

One 1950s study of working-class life in a Yorkshire mining communityfound that cosiness, a combination of warmth and comfort, was the most

important quality of the ideal home, followed by tidiness and cleanliness.29

The emphasis upon a cosy home life represented the persistence of past mean-ings of home; the ability to maintain higher standards of cleanliness repre-sented a material postwar gain. This mixing of old and new meanings of homewas also evident in the working-class community surveyed by Madelaine Kerrin the first five years of the 1950s when she observed that:

In homes, the new things are absorbed into the kind of whole instinctively reached after. Theold tradition is being encroached upon, here as in so many other areas. But the strong senseof the importance of home ensures that change is taken slowly. 30

Certainly, for the people of Ship Street, Liverpool, the home was simply toohighly valued to allow wholesale, rapid change. Home was an all-consuming


24 Ibid., xxiv.25 Ibid., xxiii.26 M. Clapson, The Suburban Aspiration in England since 1919, Contemporary BritishHistory , 14, 1 (2000), 156.27 R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957, London 1992), 37.28 Ibid., 34.29 N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is our Life. An Analysis of a YorkshireMining Community (1956, London 1969), 179.30

M. Kerr, The People of Ship Street (London 1958), 40.



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and constant factor: The Ship-Streeters pivot is his home. He is born, nursed,brought up, cared for when sick, and eventually dies, under the supervision of the Mum. 31

Neither cosiness nor the wider negotiation between old and new were evi-dent amongst working-class home-makers alone. The middle classes coulddemonstrate a similar commitment to domestic warmth and this is particular-ly evident in responses gathered by Mass-Observation in its study of theautumn 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition. 32 Designed as a morale-boostingindication of Britains manufacturing potential, Britain Can Make It includedamongst its attractions numerous domestic goods including furniture, furnish-ings and fabrics, ceramics and domestic appliances as well as furnished rooms.The overall effect was to present an optimistic vision of the well-designed,if not readily available, British home. And yet, good design did not alwayssolicit popular approval. As one housewife married to an engineer told Mass-

Observations researchers: I dont like the ultra-modern designs I likewhats cosy and neat. 33 Another woman claimed upon leaving the exhibitionthat: My tastes havent been changed for the simple reason that I have got acosy and comfortable home, as nice as any I have seen. 34 Furthermore, Mass-Observation found that the terms modern and old-fashioned were deployedby visitors to the exhibition with variable qualitative meanings attached tothem: They can both be anything from high praise to derision. 35 Old and newwere not static concepts within the context of home life: the old could be asvalued as the new within the postwar world.

Certainly a cross-class dream of attaining a home of ones own was

not new to the postwar period: it had a persuasive appeal for middle- andworking-class men and women able to rent or buy homes beyond the slumconditions of inner city life in the years up to the second world war as well asbeyond. 36 In the years before and after the war, this dream became a reality forever-growing numbers. Four million new homes were built during the interwarperiod, of which 1.5 million were state-aided: the postwar Labour governmentpresided over the building of 900,000 new houses and by 1957 2.5 millionflats and homes had been constructed, the majority by local authorities. 37Large-scale slum clearance schemes and the development of new estates


31 Ibid., 389.32 Mass-Observation employed 15 field investigators to conduct 2523 direct and informalinterviews to ascertain knowledge about and reactions to the Exhibition. For a helpful collectionof essays on the Britain Can Make It exhibition see P.J. Maguire and J.M. Woodham (eds), Designand Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. The Britain Can Make It Exhibition of 1946 (Leicester1997).33 M-OA, FR 2441, Britain Can Make It Exhibition, 26 November 1946, Section B, 13.34 Ibid., 22.35 Ibid., 13.36 J. Giles, A Home of Ones Own. Women and Domesticity in England 19181950,Womens Studies International Forum, 16, 3 (1993), 23953.37

J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing 18151985 (London 1986), 249, 286.



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actively changed both the physical environment of home and the meaningsinvested in home and community life.

In the postwar period the political meanings of housing became ever moresignificant and it was consistently central to political debate throughout the1940s and 1950s. The protracted nature of the second world war, the socialdislocation effected by large-scale evacuation schemes and the geographicalmobility of civilian war-workers, as well as servicemen and women, fosteredboth an intensified romance with home life as well as pressing practical needswhich demanded political solutions. The V-1 and V-2 attacks of 194445, forexample, damaged or destroyed nearly one-and-a-half million houses. 38Indeed, one recent study suggests that the failure to provide homes contributedsignificantly to Churchills electoral defeat in 1945. 39 Writing in Picture Post inNovember 1945 , the MP Barbara Castle outlined the nature of operationhousing by explicitly using war imagery and vocabulary. 40 Later in that

decade optimistic accounts of wartime reconstruction found their way ontothe pages of the same publication. For example, in January 1949 under theheadline Housing: London shows the way, the rebuilding of Stepney washeld up as a model of the transformative power of planning:

Many of these flats contain four rooms, a utility room, a drying balcony, a sun balcony, anda boiler in the kitchen to provide domestic hot water, or else gas or electric water-heaters. Allliving rooms will have open fires. What a contrast to the rooms pictured by CharlesDickens! 41

Nonetheless, a public opinion survey of the same year found that the Labour

governments second most outstanding failure was being too slow with hous-ing.42The difference that new housing provision could make to the quality of

family life was considerable, even where the actual gains appear quite modest.For example, one oral history interviewee, who married during the war andlived with her mother until the birth of her second son in 1947, described thedelight she felt upon moving into a postwar prefabricated house:

We thought that was lovely, houses having bathrooms, you know. You had a tin bath inthe yard and it came in front of the fire on Friday might. You had your bath in there. Toldeverybody else to clear out while you had your bath. But the prefab had a bathroom, and a

fridge. So we were well off then. And a garden.43


38 Geraldine Ann Robinson, An Investigation into the Emergency Factory-made House of 1944, DPhil thesis, University of Sussex (2003), 489.39 Ibid., 513.40 Picture Post , 29, 7, 17 November 1945, 1011.41 Picture Post , 42, 4, 22 January 1949, 78.42 Picture Post , 44, 6, 6 August 1949, 345.43 Interview with Hannah, a working-class woman born in 1916 who married in 1942 and wasa postwar housewife. These oral history interviews were conducted in 1994 as part of a widerproject on womens leisure in twentieth-century England. For more details of the interview prac-

tice see C. Langhamer, Womens Leisure in England, 19201960 (Manchester 2000).



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Despite their wider emphasis upon a supposedly alienating loss of com-munity and social solidarity attendant upon the move from Bethnal Green tothe LCC estate they fictitiously called Greenleigh, 44 Young and Willmottsmid-1950s study, Family and Kinship in East London , also found evidence of the clear material gains presented by postwar housing provision. When wefirst came we were thrilled, said Mrs Lowrie, explaining that their home inBethnal Green had been so small that meals had to be eaten in relays. Back inBethnal Green we had mice in two rooms, said Mrs Sandeman. After thatthis seemed like paradise. 45 Evidence from Birmingham, Salford and Oxfordalso emphasizes working-class approval of postwar estate life and has beenused to contest Young and Willmotts negative, and influential, assessment of the new communities. 46

And yet neither mod-con 47 living nor the basic privacy of a home of onesown, however defined, were universal experiences during this period. Old

problems persisted, in sub-standard housing, lack of basic amenities and,fundamentally, a shortage of available housing. 48 A widely-expressed desire tore-establish marital and family life in the years after the war, seen most clearlyin the postwar baby-boom which allayed population fears even before theRoyal Commission on Population had reported, in reality saw countless youngcouples compelled to live with their parents or other relatives. The continuingstrains that this created even at the end of the period considered here weredocumented by the Population Investigation Committee/Gallup Poll survey of 195961 that found that access to housing was the most frequently articulatedconcern among married couples. Analysing this data, Rachel Pierce noted the

disturbing finding that only a quarter of married couples were able to begintheir married life living independently. 49 In their Bethnal Green study Youngand Willmott found that:

In Bethnal Green few couples have much choice at the start of their marriage. They have tofind space under a roof belonging to someone else, and, since there is little enough of that,they have to put up with what they can get. So it is not surprising that many couples begintheir married life in the parental home. 50

In fact, nearly half of the couples they surveyed lived with parents immediatelyafter marriage. Nonetheless, the fantasy of a home of your own was strongly


44 Greenleigh was actually the Debden estate in South Essex.45 M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957, London 1962), 127.46 M. Clapson, The Suburban Aspiration in England since 1919, Contemporary BritishHistory , 14, 1 (2000), 1589. See also idem, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns(Manchester 1998).47 The term mod. con. was first used in a housing advertisement in Punch magazine on 24

January 1934, meaning any amenity or appliance regarded as typical of a well-equipped modernhome.48 See, for example, The Best and Worst of British Housing, Picture Post , 62, 13, 27 March1954, 37.49 Rachel M. Pierce, Marriage in the Fifties, The Sociological Review (March 1963), 233.50

Young and Willmott, op. cit., 31.



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held by all married couples, for most people anything else is second best. 51 Anassumed relationship between marital contentment and domestic location isevident in a true story of real people, which appeared in Woman magazine in1954. Entitled The house that mended a marriage, the story explainedwhy Joyce and Henry Harris were the happiest married couple in Britain. 52 Amarriage which had disintegrated under the pressure of living with parentswas revived by the experience of home-building, chiefly because Henry hadheld firm to the belief that: If only we could get our own house, our marriagewould be success. There was nothing wrong with our love. 53

Even where homes were available, they sometimes bore little resemblance tothe ideal homes promoted by exhibitions and domestic magazines. Mass-Observations study of Britain Can Make It demonstrates that individual menand women were acutely aware of this disjuncture between modern designsand practical reality: Nine out of ten people would like items that they have

seen in the Exhibition in their own homes: yet less than half that numberbelieve that they will ever have them. 54 In her mid-1950s study of Ship Street,Madelaine Kerr found that:

Frequently, several rooms in a house are out of use owing to damp, the ceiling havingcollapsed and caused general disrepair. Few houses have electric light. Most have gas, thoughone or two still use oil lamps. Most, too, have only cold water taps. In one case, water has tobe brought from a tap in the yard. The flats, being newer, are of course better equipped andmost have bathrooms. 55

In another northern city, Manchester, the 1951 Census Returns demonstrate

that 41 per cent of households did not have exclusive use of a fixed bath andonly 56 per cent could claim exclusive use of piped water, cooking stove,kitchen sink, water closet and fixed bath. 56 By 1961 over a quarter of Manchester families were without the use of a fixed bath and nearly one-fifthwere without the use of a hot water tap. 57 These figures provide clear evidenceof the persistence of pre-war conditions and suggest that postwar discoursesof classlessness had little foundation in material circumstance. As Mass-Observation had noted back in 1943, Whether or not a house possesses abathroom has become a major social dividing line. 58 This type of distinctioncontinued well into the postwar world with, of course, fundamental implica-

tions for the nature of work within the home.* * *


51 Ibid., 33.52 Woman , 15 May 1954, 53.53 Ibid.54 M-OA, FR 2441, Section B, 30. Emphasis in the original.55 Kerr, op. cit., 27.56 Census of England and Wales 1951 , County of Lancashire, 153.57 Census of England and Wales 1961 , County Report, Lancashire, 393.58

Mass-Observation, An Enquiry into Peoples Homes , op. cit., xiii.



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While the materiality of some postwar homes suggests that the home-centredsociety achieved only partial penetration, a widely-expressed desire for adifferent type of home life certainly pre-dated the 1950s. The most significantmanifestation of this desire was a demographic shift towards smaller familiesand near universal marriage at ever-younger ages. The first half of the centurywitnessed a decline in the birth-rate of such rapidity that the two-child familywas firmly established as a norm by the end of the interwar years. The periodbetween 1930 and 1950 was also, as Pat Thane has observed, the golden age,indeed the only age, of the near universal, stable, long-lasting marriage, oftenconsidered the normality from which we have since departed. 59 Both phe-nomena were key constituents of what one historian described in the 1980s asthe modern life cycle. 60 Both had significant implications for the nature andmeaning of home and offered the possibility of a more intimate home lifeduring the central years of the century. The timing of these demographic trends

makes unsupportable claims that the postwar period witnessed either a returnto traditional patterns of family life or the emergence of entirely new forms.Yet when combined with rising affluence, a nation primed for consumptionand the (eventual) availability of goods for purchase, they informed the ideaand practice of home life in postwar Britain, framing aspirations, family rela-tionships, housing plans and demand for homes. Perhaps their most widely-perceived impact, however, was in encouraging the rise of domestic privacy.

A more privatized home life was both dream and reality for middle-class,and increasing numbers of working-class, families prior to the second worldwar. The Wythenshawe council housing development in 1930s Manchester

actively encouraged a commitment to privacy and an intense family-basedlifestyle: In most oral evidence from Wythenshawe residents a favourable con-trast is drawn between the new estate, where people kept themselves to them-selves, and the intrusive older communities. 61 Moreover, even within crowdedworking-class housing, a premium was placed on the ability to mark out atleast some measure of privacy within everyday life. 62 These tendencies grew inthe years that followed. Mass-Observation noted in 1943 that:

The desire for privacy, for keeping oneself to oneself, is a powerful motive in modern society;people wanted to be all on our own like, and liked to have their own street door. Whateverpeople may think of their neighbours in the street or the people they meet shopping or going

down town, they definitely like to have their home to themselves.63


59 P. Thane, Family Life and Normality in Post-war British Culture in R. Bessel and D.Schumann (eds), Life After Death. Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge 2003), 198.60 M. Anderson, The Emergence of the Modern Life Cycle in Britain, Social History , 10, 1(1985), 6987.61 A. Hughes and K. Hunt, A Culture Transformed? Womens Lives in Wythenshawe in the1930s in A. Davies and S. Fielding (eds), Workers Worlds. Culture and Communities inManchester and Salford, 18801939 (Manchester 1992), 90.62 M. Tebbutt, Womens Talk? A Social History of Gossip in Working-class Neighbourhoods,18801960 (Aldershot 1995).63

Mass-Observation, An Enquiry into Peoples Homes , op. cit., 171.



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Hoggart, referring to the years either side of the war, suggested that:

The hearth is reserved for the family, whether living at home or nearby, and those who aresomething to us, and look in for a talk or just to sit. Much of the free time of a man and hiswife will usually be passed at that hearth; just staying-in is still one of the most commonleisure-time occupations. 64

Moreover, as with other aspects of postwar domesticity, there was a degree of instrumentality in adopting new patterns of living while maintaining aspectsof the old. Melanie Tebbutt, for example, rejects a view of the new estates of both the 1930s and 1950s as necessarily less social than other patterns of housing. 65 One interviewee recalled a real sense of community on the newestate where she lived in the 1950s: You could always depend on, if youwanted any help there was always a neighbour would help out with some-thing. And it was a very close community. 66 Indeed, the very factors that are

often seen as integral to the home-centred society, such as private gardens,could themselves inculcate a sense of community, as another intervieweerecalled:

We paid a shilling a week into a fund and we bought a lawnmower that was communalproperty and a wheelbarrow and gardening tools. And shared them out between us and sortof dug one anothers gardens over, you know to get them done quickly. 67

In particular, mothers used child-related activities to make social contacts andin doing so maintained relationships outside the home:

And the kids played in the garden with one another cos they had plenty of friends, cos every-one was the same kind of thing. And we had the school run, we used to take it in turns totake half a dozen kids to school. Bring them home at lunchtime and take them back againand bring them home at home time. But we did turns each so we didnt have the same thingto do every day. Thered be a little crowd of mothers at the school gate waiting for them. 68

The woman-centred neighbourhood networks that provided mutual aid andsupport for families in the years before the second world war were, in thisrespect, reconstituted for a new era. 69

And yet a trend towards a more home-based leisure and increasingly morehome-centred patterns of consumption did deepen in the postwar years. As

one male respondent to a recent Mass-Observation directive on memories and


64 Hoggart, op. cit., 35.65 Tebbutt, op. cit., 154.66 Interview with Irene, 1994. Irene was a working-class woman born in Manchester in 1922who married in 1952 and had two children.67 Interview with Hannah, 1994.68 Ibid.69 On neighbourhood networks in the interwar period see E. Roberts, A Womans Place. AnOral History of Working-class Women, 18901940 (Oxford 1984). On the postwar years see M.Clapson, Working-class Womens Experiences of Moving to New Housing Estates in England

since 1919, 20th Century British History , 10, 3 (1999), 345.



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images of the 1950s asserted: Our interests lay entirely in our home which wehad just moved into and our marriage which had just begun . . . our ownentertainment was family games and the wireless programmes, our home andgarden were all-consuming. 70

Rising living standards, decreasing hours of paid work and improved hous-ing provision for many heralded the triumph of domestic forms of leisure: thephenomenal rise of television and simultaneous decline of the cinema beingonly one example. While just 4.3 per cent of the population owned a televisionset in 1950, 81.8 per cent possessed one a decade later. 71 Yet home-basedleisure was never unproblematic leisure as far as most women and some menwere concerned. As home-based and family leisure gained ascendancy overalternative leisure habits, the creation of a comfortable site for other familymembers to enjoy themselves became an important aspect of domestic work .Home-based leisure was a form of leisure that needed to be serviced. 72

Interest in the appearance of the postwar home was intense and was itself asite where work and leisure as well as education and entertainment intersected.For example, ever-increasing attention was paid to home aesthetics inwomens magazines and wide-ranging advice on home design was offered toreaders. The popularity of the Britain Can Make It exhibition, which attractedover a million people, provides additional evidence of this interest in aes-thetics: 92 per cent of those leaving the exhibition told Mass-Observation thatthey would recommend it to their friends. 73 Despite the absence of prices forgoods displayed and the widespread understanding that Britain can make it,but not get it, 74 the exhibition seemed highly effective in fuelling and directing

the desire for better-looking homes, at least amongst the artisan class whoformed a disproportionate percentage of the visitors. As Mass-Observationnoted: A number of people mention that they now realise how shabby theirown homes are. . . . In some cases it seems that a long-established satisfactionwith homes has been disturbed. 75 The central attraction for visitors were thefurnished rooms, and although half of the visitors claimed that their tastes hadnot been changed by their visit to the exhibition, subsequent research visits tointerviewees homes suggested that the exhibition rarely failed to exert somedegree of influence in terms of desired change if not actual alteration. 76

The 1946 exhibition provides an early example of attempts made by post-

war design experts to mould public taste. Five years later, the avowedlyforward-looking Festival of Britain performed a similar function. Designedboth as a tonic to the nation and proclamation of national recovery theexhibition of MaySeptember 1951 showcased new talent in the arts and


70 M-OA, DR, Spring 2003, Television and Images of the 1950s and 1960s, Men no. G2134.71 A.H. Halsey (ed.), Trends in British Society Since 1900 (Basingstoke 1972), 552.72 Langhamer, op. cit., 13345.73 M-OA, FR 2441, Section A, 15.74 Ibid.75 M-OA, FR 2441, Section B, 21.76

Ibid., 28.



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sciences while providing a national celebration to mark the centenary ofthe Great Exhibition. The Festival placed popular education in culture at itscentre; the household was to be the key site of learning. 77 As in 1946, theFestival planners attempted to communicate expert ideas about the design of everyday household goods and homes to the general public. Within a countryemerging from postwar austerity and the immediate housing crisis there was,however, more scope than in 1946 to shape actual consumer practices. 78The Live Architecture Exhibition in the East End of London presented ascientifically-built estate in explicit contrast to the slums of the past. TheFestivals Land and Sea Travelling Exhibitions, through which the LondonExhibition was diffused throughout the country, included a section on Peopleat Home, wherein domestic problems were shown to be resolvable throughthe combined efforts of designer and scientist. The Festivals Battersea PleasureGardens provided luxury goods for sale, implicitly guiding its visitors in

appropriate styles of consumption. A particular domestic design vision there-fore permeated the Festival of 1951 and framed its reception. 79

Certainly, new types of housing encouraged owners and tenants to engage inhome-improvement and gardening in their so-called leisure time. Home-making in its most literal form became a significant pastime for some, thoughnot all, men. Young and Willmott claimed that the men who made the movefrom Bethnal Green to Greenleigh increasingly operated within a mode of companionate marriage:

We can see that husbands not only do more to aid their wives in emergencies; they also spendless on themselves and more on their families. When they watch the television instead of drinking beer in the pub, and weed the garden instead of going to a football match, thehusbands of Greenleigh have taken a stage further the partnership mentioned in an earlierchapter as one of the characteristics of modern Bethnal Green. The home and the family of marriage becomes the focus of a mans life, as of his wifes, far more completely than in theEast End. 80

In a later study of the middle-class suburb of Woodford, the same authorsclaimed to find husbands who were as busy keeping up with rapidly changingfashions of interior decoration and design as his wife is kept absorbed in con-forming to rising and ever-changing standards of child-care, cookery anddress. More money is used for the house, more leisure used for work. 81

The universality of this reformed model of masculinity, and indeed the verac-ity of the research upon which it is based, has been questioned. 82 If a reformed


77 B. Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation. The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester2003), 49.78 Ibid., 49.79 Ibid., 51.80 Young and Willmott, op. cit., 145.81 P. Willmott and M. Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London 1960), 33.82 J. Finch and P. Summerfield, Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of CompanionateMarriage, 194559 in D. Clark (ed.), Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change. Writings for

Jacqueline Burgoyne (194488) (London 1991), 23.



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domesticated masculinity did exist it was certainly cut through by differencesof generation, occupation and social identity and framed by the specificitiesof individual relationship networks. For example, Dennis, Henriques andSlaughters study of the Ashton mining community in Yorkshire observedthat:

A mans centres of activity are outside his home; it is outside his home that are located thecriteria of success and social acceptance. He works and plays, and makes contact with othermen and women, outside his home. The comedian who defined home as the place whereyou fill the pools in on a Wednesday night was something of a sociologist. 83

It has recently been suggested that the family man of the 1940s and 1950swas neither an unconditional nor an entirely secure masculine identity; it wascertainly not a universal one. 84 Nonetheless, a close relationship undoubtedlyexisted between the changing nature of housing, home, family life and experi-ences of leisure. As Constantine notes in his study of amateur gardening, there-building of British cities in this century has had a profound effect on theleisure activities of that large section of the population which was involved. 85The nature of housing provision did not directly cause a shift towards home-centred leisure but it reflected, reinforced and enabled developing trends toreach fruition.

In addition to acting as a location for leisure and leisure work, the postwarhome was also a site of consumption. Yet postwar consumer dreams had theirroots in an earlier period. In the 1930s, advertisements for domestic productspromised domestic harmony, comfort and the minimization of labour. Forexample, Triplex Grates were advertised as follows: Lucky young woman,shes starting 1937 with her best wish come true. Theres a sparkle in her eyesas she surveys the handsome new Triplex. . . . Three hundred and sixty-fivedays of luxury and leisure ahead of her. 86 By 1945 Picture Post offered a fore-taste of some of the things the post-war home may have . . . one day: theyare American ideas in design for comfort and labour saving. 87 The goodspresented included a transparent lunch box, a fly screen and a chair designedto give 100 per cent comfort. More ambitious desires achieved partialrealization in the 1950s and it was women who were deemed responsible fororchestrating domestic consumption. As well as acting as the guardians of

home and family leisure, women were charged with choosing and purchasingfor the house. Yet women did not consume passively. 88 Instead, they invested


83 Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, op. cit., 180. Emphasis in the original.84 M. Francis, The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- andTwentieth-century British Masculinity, The Historical Journal , 45, 3 (2002), 645.85 S. Constantine, Amateur Gardening and Popular Recreation in the 19th and 20thCenturies, Journal of Social History , 14, 3 (Spring 1981), 401.86 Good Housekeeping , 30, 5 (January 1937), 87.87 Picture Post , 26, 6, 10 February 1945, 22.88 A. Partington, The Designer Housewife in the 1950s in J. Attfield and P. Kirkham (eds), A

View from the Interior. Women and Design (London 1995).



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their own meanings in designed goods, meanings which were sometimes atodds with the producers intent, if necessary ignoring design dictates to pro-duce a domestic look that was simultaneously modern, reassuringly cosy and,above all, practical. As one visitor to the Britain Can Make It exhibitionobserved of the domestic appliances section: Oh, Im just interested in wash-ing machines, and anything that makes life easier for the housewife. Thissection is really the most important for the housewife. 89 Commenting on atti-tudes towards the furniture exhibited, Mass-Observation found that aestheticand practical considerations balanced each other out. 90 Despite the vigour withwhich modern interior design and furnishings were promoted, they rarelyachieved a total victory within the aesthetics of everyday postwar homes: thedialogue between old and new continued and it was the chooser and spenderwife who mediated between the two.

How, then, did individual men and women understand and negotiate theirdomestic lives in the postwar period and to what extent did these understand-ings differ from those of previous decades? The modern life cycle outlinedabove ensured that during the middle years of the twentieth century, genderroles were in a state of transition, with men and women working out newways of living within a historically-distinct family framework. Revision andnegotiation, rather than acceptance and acquiescence, are perhaps the mosthelpful way of understanding gender relations in this period. Certainly,the assumption that postwar domesticity and traditional gender roles were

mutually reinforcing needs to be challenged.First, to what extent did the postwar period witness the emergence of a newman as suggested by Abrams? We have already seen that the emergence of masculine homemaking accompanied the emergence of new forms of housing.Combined with a reduction in working hours and increases in real incomes,new housing forms also encouraged an expansion of housework for men,albeit an expansion mediated by gendered discourses of appropriateness. 91Distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable male housework remainedof real significance. So, for example, when Mass-Observation asked its panel-lists to describe the household jobs most usually performed by men in 1948,

they provided the following list: mending and fixing, carrying the coal,chopping firewood, lighting the fire, washing up, table-setting and window-cleaning. 92 All of these were, of course, time-limited jobs rather than moreexpansive responsibilities. Nonetheless, some men were engaged in the workof childcare and other more routine domestic chores, as one respondent to the2003 Mass-Observation Directive recalled:


89 M-OA, FR 2441, Section C, 14.90 Ibid., 2532.91 J. Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 18901960. Gender, Class and Ethnicity(London 1994), 8194.92

M-OA, DR, March/April 1948, Housework.



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In my early married life I used to come home at night to a pile of soiled napkins which Iwashed and wrung by hand. My wife kept the sheets for my return so that we could wringthem out together. How we should have welcomed a spin-dryer. 93

Hoggart certainly claimed to identify a measured change over time amongstworking-class couples:

Among some younger husbands there are signs of a striking change in the basic attitude. . . .Some working-class husbands will share the washing up if their wives go out to work, or willtake turns with the baby if their job releases them early and not too tired. But many wivescome home from work just as tired as their husbands and set to to do all the houseworkwithout help from them. And not many working-class husbands will help their wives bypushing the baby round the streets in its pram. That is still thought soft, and most wiveswould sympathise with the view. 94

As we have already seen, other social surveys, notably those rooted in areasof heavy industry, identified the maintenance of more rigid gender roles. 95Nonetheless, it seems accurate to conclude that there was an increasinglyactive masculine role within postwar domesticity, albeit within a wider frame-work of continuity in female responsibility for actually running the home.

Recent work has largely moved away from an understanding of domesticityas necessarily a source of oppression for women. Instead, domesticity isincreasingly viewed as a rational choice for women, a possible source of delight and an opportunity to exercise real skill. 96 It was also a discourse thatexplicitly differentiated between the identities of migrant and indigenouswomen. 97 Yet while domesticity might be embraced, it was rarely done so in anunmediated way: women contested and refined it to suit their own conceptionof home.

Home management, as The Housewifes Pocket Book of 1953 explained,is not an easy job, and unless a little thought is given to organising, it caneasily become sheer drudgery, with everything in a muddle and the work neverdone. 98 Moreover, Home-making is an art about which one can never knowenough. It is quite the most important of all human activities, and howeverwell it is done it can always be done just a little better, thereby bringing tolife an even greater richness. 99 In these two statements this domestic manualsuggests the grounds for potential disgruntlement, the ever-increasing capacity

of the domestic role to expand, and asserts its fundamental value withinsociety. A recent study of 1950s American cookbooks suggests that closereadings of domestic texts can reveal more than an unchallenged discourse of


93 M-OA, DR, Spring 2003, Television and Images of the 1950s and 1960s, Men no. K1515.94 Hoggart, op. cit., 57.95 See, for example, Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, op. cit.96 J. Bourke, Housewifery in Working Class England, 18601914, Past and Present , 143,(May 1994), 16797; Giles, op. cit.; Light, op. cit., 21721.97 Webster, op. cit.98 The Housewifes Pocket Book (London 1953), 11.99

Ibid.



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domestic conformity. They can, in fact, suggest contradictions and anxietiesby articulating what must not be articulated but assumed, in order to main-tain traditional gender roles. 100 Certainly, the definitional tension betweenart and drudgery alluded to in the Pocket Book provided the basis for con-tentment and discontentment with postwar domesticity.

When asked about their postwar experiences, women rarely fail to expresspleasure in at least some aspects of their domestic work. As one working-classinterviewee explained:

I think its just that I did just enjoy, I just enjoyed having it nice and putting your nice tea setout and that sort of thing, you know. It was all part of the pleasure. . . . This home makingthing to me was nice, you know. 101

It is also clear that women developed strategies to evade those aspects of thejob that they most disliked, as the following extract demonstrates:

My bugbear the stairs (laughs) cleaning them. Oh I used to hate vaccing the stairs, used to doeverything and then Id say to Dennis, now Ive done it all, Ive only the stairs to do when Icome back. So Id know that when Id come back hedve done the stairs (laughs) He nevercottoned on (laughs) Never cottoned on. 102

Nonetheless, as the spread in ownership of labour-saving devices wasonly partial even at the end of the 1950s, housework remained physically-demanding work; work which daughters observed with increasing disdain. Acentral motif within much life history material and works of fiction which

illuminate the process of growing up in 1950s Britain is a refusal to accepthome life as then constructed. Whether we consider the writings of the AngryYoung Men or the reflections of those who later benefited from the emergenceof second wave feminism in the late 1960s, a construction of 1950s domes-ticity as oppressive and stultifying has stuck hard. As Angela Carter put it: Igrew up in the fifties that is, I was twenty in the 1960s, and, by God, Ideserved what happened later. It was tough, in the fifties. Girls wore whitegloves.103

Yet, a desire for a different kind of life is not absent from sources whichdocument girls growing up in the 1940s and, indeed, the preceding decade. Inher study of young women on the cusp of adulthood, conducted in 1945, Pearl

Jephcott described the aspirations of working-class girls, moulded by theirown experience of overcrowded homes and lack of privacy:


100 J. Neuhaus, The Way to a Mans Heart. Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology and Cookbooksin the 1950s, Journal of Social History , 32, 3 (1999), 547.101 Interview with Jean, 1994. Jean was born in 1930, married in 1955 and had two children.102 Interview with Ivy, 1994. Ivy was born in 1920 to working-class parents, married in 1943and had three children.103 A. Carter, Truly It Felt Like Year One in S. Maitland (ed.), Very Heaven. Looking back at

the 1960s (London 1988).



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The intelligent girls realize how much the badly planned, over-packed home has added totheir mothers work, which, in the mining families, is normally heavy. The girls know at first-hand how difficult it is to bring up children satisfactorily under such conditions. They realizewhat extra effort an additional child causes and what difficulties even minor illnesses mayadd. They have seen and shared these burdens for all their eighteen years and they do notintend, if they can avoid it, to have a similar life for themselves. 104

Work on youthful lives in interwar Britain has shown that a combination of new job opportunities, increased disposable income and access to commercialleisure inculcated a sense of freedom and independence in young Britishwomen which marked their youthful years as different from those of theirmothers. 105 Certainly, it has been suggested that girls, rather than boys, werethe driving force behind an interwar teenage culture. 106 A re-formed marriagerelationship, and through this, access to a home of ones own, was oftenconstructed as a way of escaping the fate of the mother. 107 The limitation of family size was central to a sense of control over that home. Thus, while girlswho grew up in the 1950s might position themselves against domesticity perse, earlier cohorts positioned themselves against domestic drudgery , makinginformed choices which they hoped would enable them to avoid the kind of life led by their mothers.

However, it was not just young women and men who expressed their dis-content with domesticity in the postwar years. For some adult working-classwomen, dreams of domestic life conflicted with the everyday reality: domestic-ity 1950s-style differed from the pre-war fantasy in a number of respects.Within an era often defined as one in which the domestic was privileged, the

status of domestic work actually fell sharply. Whilst domesticity as imaginedin the interwar period was a full-time, modern profession, in the postwarperiod other pressures drew women outside the home in increasing numbers.Between 1931 and 1951, the proportion of women in employment agedbetween 35 and 59 jumped from 26 per cent to 43 per cent. 108 The rise inlabour market participation amongst married women actually led to a reduc-tion in the status attached to home-making. A general perception that marriedwomens wages were now used to buy extras for the family, rather than toensure survival, undermined the importance of their contribution to thefamily economy, despite the fact that for some women paid labour remained a

pressing necessity. Moreover, working-class womans traditional skills of managing, making and budgeting became less valued in an age of consumergoods and rising incomes. 109


104 P. Jephcott, Rising Twenty (London 1948), 378.105 Langhamer, op. cit.106 K. Milcoy, Image and Reality. Working-class Teenage Girls Leisure in Bermondsey duringthe Interwar Years, DPhil thesis, University of Sussex, 2000, 225.107 J. White, The Worst Street in North London. Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars(London 1986), 197.108 Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain , 99.109

Roberts, op cit., 92.



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For middle-class women, too, domesticity failed to deliver what it promised:a skilled and scientific role became, in the absence of domestic servants afterthe war, a commitment to chores which their mothers would have employedother women to perform. Some contemporary commentators claimed to iden-tify in the person of the middle-class housewife a vivid illustration of a moregeneral levelling-down of class difference. Ruth Bowley, for example, askedPicture Post readers in 1949, Is the Middle Class Doomed?, suggesting that:

Today, the middle-class wife and the council-flat wife queue side by side for the fish. Later,they may meet again at the doctors surgery. They may wait together outside the primaryschool playground. Both wear utility coats, and carry heavy shopping bags. And their handsshow the same story of potatoes peeled and floors scrubbed. 110

In fact, recent work reveals that, faced with a discourse of classlessness,middle-class women attempted to mark out their own identities within thecategory housewife by emphasizing creative homemaking over the roughof household maintenance. 111

Across classes, the promised professional and respected modern occupationbecame, in reality, a part-time job that could be combined with other, alsounder-valued, part-time jobs. The fact that this re-conceptualization followeda period when both unpaid and paid work had been presented as valuable warwork must have made the transition all the more painful. A combination of the unravelling of the construction of housewifery as a full-time occupation,the social isolation felt by some housewives within their new homes and thenew domestic labours that middle-class women found themselves expected toperform, led some women to feel cheated of the value that had been placed ontheir work. They see marriage as a full-time career, and they want, literally, tomake a job of it, observed Pearl Jephcott of the girls she surveyed at the end of the war. It is a matter of principle, even with those girls who are maddeninglyirresponsible in every other way, that a womans first duty is to look after herown home. 112

Modern domesticity reached maturity in the postwar period but the demo-graphic trends which framed the emergence of Abramss home-centred

society and the aspirations which fuelled material reality pre-dated the ColdWar era. The second world war did not, of itself, create a desire to retreat intothe private world of home, although it undoubtedly fired pre-existing desires.In this way, the postwar narrative of new beginnings and historically-distinctlifestyles neglects significant aspects of pre-war domestic life across socialclasses. As Conekin et al. put it, The modern in this period was a hybrid


110 Picture Post , 43, 10, 4 June 1949, 13.111 J. Giles, Help for Housewives. Domestic Service and the Reconstruction of Domesticity inBritain, 19401950, Womens History Review , 10, 2 (2001), 299332.112

Jephcott, op. cit., 72.



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affair, assembled out of tales about the past as well as narratives of thefuture. 113

Certainly, there was much that was new in the years after the second worldwar: postwar affluence was undoubtedly a central factor in enabling moderndomesticity to take hold; new housing stock provided more than simply alocation for the home-centred lifestyle, and the memory of war heightened adesire for domestic stability. But domestic fantasies were themselves estab-lished prior to the war and were informed by the knowledge that smallerfamily size had already fundamentally altered the nature of family life inBritain. While family size continued to decline beyond the period examinedhere, by the 1970s the golden age of stable, near universal marriage was overas marriage rates dropped and divorce rates spiralled. To this extent the home-centred society discussed in this article was historically specific to the centralyears of the twentieth century.

Yet, home-centredness was never a uniform experience: the significant num-bers who lacked homes of their own even at the end of the 1950s attest tothis. As we have seen, significant numbers of households entered the 1960swithout the privacy, comfort or labour-saving consumer durables which havebecome characteristic of the affluent society. Nor was the domesticity uponwhich home-centredness was founded entirely uncontested. Both men andwomen had reasons to suspect that the material reality that followed earlierdreams was not quite what they had anticipated. Young women in particularexpressed a reluctance to acquiesce in the new consumption-defined domestic-ity, while adult women could be forgiven for thinking that the reality of

postwar domesticity did not live up to its earlier promise.When Mass-Observation asked for memories and recollections of the 1950sin spring 2003, popular memories of this period were cut through by gender.Amongst men, home and domestic life were infrequently explicitly central toreconstructions of the past. The narratives they offered suggest myriad otherways of reading the postwar period: safety, order, respect for others, simplici-ty and a less frenetic pace of life are constructed as key characteristics. Forexample, a 69-year-old man described a more ordered, well mannered, con-siderate and leisurely way of life . . . it was less hectic, we had more time toenjoy leisure, there was full employment, we were more polite and considerate

to each other, people could be seen smiling in the street, they looked and werehappier, both poor and rich. 114 Another observed that life was not driven bycommercialisation. 115 Such responses clearly speak to contemporary concernsabout, for example, crime, violence and the individualization of everyday lifeand are refracted through the rapid social, cultural and political changes thataccompanied the last years of the twentieth century. They also warn us against


113 B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity. Reconstructing Britain19451964 (London 1999), 3.114 M-OA, DR Spring 2003, Television and Images of the 1950s and 1960s, Men no. A883.115

Ibid., Men no. B1426.



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assigning undue dominance to domesticity as the defining feature of the post-war world. Nonetheless, while many women offered similar reconstructions,speaking of safety, security and familiarity, 116 others conjured up dominantmemories more explicitly rooted within the home, such as the intricacies of domestic labour, the routines of family life and the aesthetics of the 1950shouse. Such gendered reconstructions of the past should not, of course, sur-prise: home exercises a more powerful historical pull on the memories of thosewho worked within it. Moreover, even those conceptualizations of the post-war period which do not explicitly place home at their centre speak to notionsof home implicitly in their evocation of stability and security.

When locating the postwar years within a longer historical trajectory, Mass-Observers of both genders tended to locate the 1950s in a continuum with thepre-war period. As one respondent put it: What does strike me is that theperiod I grew up in say mid-fifties to mid-seventies was in many ways

far more similar to the period my parents grew up in the mid-twenties tomid-forties than to the world today, another 30 years on. 117 Considerationof the postwar home should encourage historians of twentieth-century Britainto explore further the dynamic relationship between the 1930s and the 1950s:not to identify a postwar return to traditional models but to unravel the com-plex manner in which dreams first dreamt before the second world war wererealized, adapted or rejected in the Cold War era. While home life in the 1950swas not an unproblematic return to earlier patterns, neither was it sufficientlydistinct from interwar experiences to be viewed as a new model of living.

Claire Langhamer is Senior Lecturer in History at Sussex University. She is the author

of Womens Leisure in England, 19201960 (Manchester 2000) andis currently working on a history of love and courtship in

twentieth-century Britain.


116 Ibid., Women no. A2212.117

Ibid., Women no. B2948.

meaning of home in 1950s britain

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